Sow's Udder

Origin: Rome, Italy

Source: Apicius, 400

History

This recipe survives in the collection known as Apicius (De re coquinaria), a later anonymous compilation of Roman cookery assembled around the 4th–5th century CE and attached to the name of Marcus Gavius Apicius, a 1st-century gourmet who did not demonstrably write it. It preserves sumen — the udder of a sow — which Romans counted among the choicest cuts of pork rather than a humble one. The instructions are terse in the manner of the whole book and give no quantities: the udder is boiled, pricked with reeds, salted, and finished in the oven or over a grill, then dressed with a sauce of pepper, lovage, and liquamen (the ordinary fermented fish sauce) tempered with wine and raisin-wine (passum) and thickened with starch. Its prestige is well attested outside the kitchen. Pliny records that the censors' sumptuary law tried to bar the pig's richest cuts from banquets — the paunch, sweetbreads, testicles, womb (the vulva, a celebrated sow delicacy distinct from the udder), and cheeks; the udder (sumen) itself is not named in that banned list, but the passage shows how prized such pork offal was. Sumen's own luxury standing is fixed by verse instead: the poet Martial gave it a Saturnalia gift-couplet, the delicacy prized above all when taken from a sow that had just farrowed. Later satire treats it as an unambiguous luxury — Persius makes a gift of sumen the bait a patron dangles for flattery. Whether Apicius the man ever cooked it is unknowable; the dish belongs to elite Roman dining broadly, and a companion recipe in the same book stuffs the whole udder with salted sea-urchin.

Ingredients

Instructions

  1. Boil the udder, skewer it on reeds, sprinkle with salt, and set it in the oven or on the gridiron to part-roast.
  2. Grind pepper and lovage, add liquamen, and blend with unmixed wine and passum.
  3. Bind the sauce with wheat starch and pour it over the udder.

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